


For the Forest, There are Trees

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: Idioglossia [2]
Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: 1990s, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, Drinking & Talking, Episode: s01e05 The Jersey Devil, Gen, M/M, Strawberry Blond Johnny Storm, Teasing, did i mention it's the 90s, speaking of: johnny and jen go way back, the fun ruthless kind like when your best friend realizes you have a crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 19:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: A glimpse into partnerships, both life-long and fledgling, by way of a quiet night on her couch, and a still day in the forest.





	For the Forest, There are Trees

**Author's Note:**

> me: i might do a couple little pieces for this verse haha  
> also me: so actually i came up w a bunch of deep lore i'm gonna slowly sprinkle in and im rlly invested in their characters and also-

Jen was already mixing drinks when Johnny knocked. Or that was what he assumed because he could hear glass clinking through her slim front door, and it was either that or she had started drinking without him, which was a consideration he didn't want to have to make.

He knocked again, a little more insistent, and the door swung open to reveal a woman more haggard in her bureaucratic leanings than even he.

"Rough day?" he asked, but he already knew. They'd long learned to interpret what they could from the slightest things about one another. And between her hair loose around her shoulders, her suit half assembled, and the red-rawness of her skin where she'd scrubbed her make-up off, he could infer a lot.

"Mm," she hummed, dark eyebrows going up her forehead in something far on the other side of amusement. "You could say that." From the drop of amber still hanging on her bottom lip, he thought he would.

As he entered, he started shelling himself of his jacket and shoes while moving deeper into her living room. "That bad?"

He didn't know why he asked - it was answered in the fact that her fingers were working on the stopper for whatever her first drink had been of and not the cork of the cheap-ass wine they'd been turned onto when they were undergrads and didn't even have the thought of a pot to piss in.

Pouring a drink for him, she replied, "Worse than you're thinking," which was as much an admitted defeat as she'd ever give.

"Shit, Jen- I'm sorry." 

It wasn't that she was a bad loser - she was the best at anything she did, after all, civility and grace dripping from her even after the most unsavory of verdicts - but losing cases like the ones she took, that recovery was hard. 

So this wasn't self-pity or wallowing, was as far removed from narcissism as it got. This was an anger bone-deep at an injustice she could only watch in slow motion as the gavel banged.

"Oh, I won," she said, seemingly answering the question he'd kept in the back of his throat. "No, I won pretty damn well, if I do say so myself." She nodded simply to herself as she passed the glass to him and they took their respective ends of her well-worn couch. 

Her legs were longer than his, feet hitting him closer to the hip than where his met her by her thigh. She wiggled her toes thoughtfully, shifting the fabric of her suit-pants, pulled next at the strap of the tank-top she'd had on under her button-up, shifted again.

He didn't say anything else, just nursed the drink in his hand and waited.

She flicked her green eyes up, running her tongue harshly across her teeth. "Do you believe in monsters, Johnny?"

An ice cube clacked roughly against his teeth, sending a shock of pain through his gums that left him grimacing into the heavy glass. "Why do you ask?" he fired back around his own stumbling tongue.

"Because the things I've seen in court this week-" Her face pinched inward, recollection. "I don't know if I can believe that a human's capable of that, John."

His mouth twisted, pulling at the dimples that pierced his skin. "I think it's easier," he started, trying to find the words. "To believe that we as humans aren't capable of the most atrocious or egregious acts, but the simple fact is that we are."

She frowned into her own drink, thick brown waves patting her shoulders in solace, but didn't present her rebuttal, so he swirled his drink and continued.

"But I don't think easy's necessarily wrong, y'know? It can get us through the day, help us sleep at night, and then we're still here tomorrow to try and put a little more good back out into the world. Even a barely tipped scale is still off-balance."

She considered that before tucking it behind the shell of her ear alongside strips of hair. A reminder for another time and place.

"So then you haven't found any monsters yet? Tramping all over the country with that guy of yours - Parker, right? - you'd think you'd find one needle in the proverbial haystack." Her mouth was tilted in a challenge he gladly took, if only to lift her spirits, and not at all because he had all manner of thoughts about his partner he needed to voice to someone other than his locked car.

He sipped his drink, pale brows ducked toward the rim. Demurely, "No, we haven't."

She grinned slightly. "That so?" He knew that face, it was the one that simultaneously almost got him arrested and talked him out of detainment on a particularly eventful collegiate spring break. It was her three seconds before trouble and ten before peace face. "You find anything else, then?"

He didn't appreciate the coquettish flare she'd decided to spice her words with, a childish hunch befalling his shoulders as a decidedly adult embarrassment trilled through him. "Paperwork," he said in petulance. "Lot of paperwork."

She tossed her head back in a worthwhile laugh, edges of her sea-like drink battering the rocks as her hands shook. "Come on, John, you said he was cute-!"

Whip-quick, " _I_ didn't say he was cute, _you_ asked if he was, and I-"

"Didn't deny it." Now she was using her 'I graduated summa cum laude from UCLA so don't try your shit with me' face. He suddenly, desperately, wished she was drunk enough not to be able to make those faces or he was drunk enough not to notice them because they were veritable bullshit-be-gone and he'd had a long enough week as it was without deep-diving into his psyche.

"If he's anything he's a pain in the ass." A pause, a contradiction, "No, he's not, he's just." A sigh, a ducked head. "He's really dedicated to his work."

Johnny had known that going in, couldn't complain about it if he tried, and he didn't particularly want to. He hadn't been bothered by it when he'd gotten the assignment, and after sitting in that little motel room in Oregon, heart finally starting to quiet as Parker softly explained the disappearance of his uncle, who he did what he did for and why he could never stop, Johnny couldn't say one ill word about Peter Parker's drive.

Jen balked. "And you aren't? You got on a plane within what, twelve hours of meeting the man? No questions, just a file and a half-baked abduction story."

"Something like that. And it wasn't half-baked. Maybe three-quarters."

"You're making it exceedingly hard to believe a word that comes out of your mouth, Johnny."

"He's- Parker's not a bad guy," he explained, hedging a quick look at her. "And even if it all turned out to be fantasticated bullshit, I don't think he'd care, not in the end. He gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, listens patiently to every person- I've never seen him make anyone feel less than. Even when everyone around them thinks they're batshit, Jen, he doesn't. All he wants is to find the truth, no matter what that truth is, and- and I think that pursuit is admirable."

Jen's faced softened, half a smile on her face as she patted Johnny's leg. "What about you?" she asked simply.

"What about me?"

"Does he listen to you? Does he have your back?"

Johnny ran his finger along the line of his pants' leg, nail scritching at the pinstriped fabric. He didn't have to consider the questions long - had only known Peter Parker for a handful of weeks that had gone by in a blink and already knew the answers without a shadow of a doubt. They were as known to him as the back of his hand and as strong as the beliefs he held.

"Yeah, he does" he mumbled, hand finding its way up to shake through his hair, finally falling loose from the style he'd rolled it into that morning. "I don't, I _wouldn't_ , trust anyone else to do it."

She raised a brow. "Seriously?"

If he didn't, he wouldn't have gotten on that plane day one over some puncture marks and an outdated file. If he didn't, he wouldn't have sat in that bar and gone along because of rashes and intrigue. If he didn't, he wouldn't have entertained the idea of ten inch fingers and centennial killers or Girl Scout tabloids and messages in TV static.

If he didn't, he wouldn't be planning to pick up a rental car at 8am sharp tomorrow to get back to Jersey as fast as humanly possible.

"Seriously."

"All right." She raised a hand in surrender. "That's all I needed to hear."

▪▪▪

Parker was leaned against the hood of the car, elbows folded under him and wind ruffling his hair. He tapped his fingers against the metal - thinking, Johnny assumed, by that and the way his bottom lip was pinned between his teeth. There was a question rolling through Johnny's tongue that involved those lips, but that was the byproduct of not enough sleep and the staleness of half a hangover. Or, that was what he was trying to tell himself, but these things were hard in the quiet.

"Was your drive okay?"

Johnny huffed a laugh, brushing the coil of his hair back off his forehead as he settled back on his bandwagon. "Excuse me?"

"Your drive," he repeated, eyes carefully trained on the patch of rust beneath his sloppily manicured nail.

"I mean- it was fine."

"Your night?"

"It was pretty dull- which I think you already know because we're standing here having this conversation." _I have a life; I have a life, don't you know that, Parker; I have a life, I swear, please believe me; I have a life, but it's been a month and then some and I'm steadily pinning all my hope on you; I used to have a life; I had a life, and now I have you._

A cloud shifted overhead, icing Parker in lemon sunlight that pointed out the natural highlights in his hair, and the green in his hazel eyes.

Johnny wondered when the newness would wear off.

"No hot date?" he asked with a hedging smile, but his eyes didn't dare move. Johnny wasn't sure what he'd have done if they did, but he didn't think it'd be anything particularly smart.

Muffling his own grin in the soundproof walling of his dimpled cheeks, he said, "Jen'd break my arm if she heard me call her that," instead of, "Why do you want to know?"

Parker hummed, dragging his nail back and forth, collecting shavings in oranges and browns. "Jen?"

"My best friend. There something on your mind, Parker?" he finally asked, resting his elbows against the hood and not caring what collected on his suit sleeves. He already had outstanding dry cleaning bills as it was, a little more couldn't hurt, especially if it got them on some kind of level ground here.

Parker looked up, eyes flashing in pine needles and rough bark pierced by golden bullets. "Something's not adding up."

"You're just now getting that feeling?"

Cheap shot, Johnny knew, but Parker seemed to like it when he didn't cajole his humor into something water cooler appropriate. Preferred, even, when he sniped rather than acquiesced, and fought rather than conceded. Johnny had spent more than a few years bowing to others wishes and plans, so even if it was just rolling his eyes at aliens and cryptids, at least Parker listened to what he had to say.

"What do you think?"

"That I'd much rather be standing on the coast with the wind in my hair than in this wet-smelling forest getting bodily threatened by ticks."

A soft smile, already riddled with fondness sure enough to be deadly one of these days. "About the case, Storm, what do you think about the case?"

"Oh, that? I think nature is amazing and humans have a distinct will to survive that which they shouldn't." _Duh,_ said his tone, _ask me again, call me Johnny, keep looking at me like that_ said every other piece of him.

"So…?"

He made him wait. Was so used to him having all the guesses and answers and questions clutched within his well-meaning, curious hands that he couldn't do anything but.

Finally, once he was on the edge of his seat, leaned so far across the hood of the car it would be nothing for them to brush skin, Johnny said, "Feral child."

Parker blinked behind his glasses, half of his mouth moving in incredulity and the other pedalling toward amazement. "You believe in the possibility of a child being raised outside of the confines of society by animals?"

And there they were, right back to the comfortable ruts they had dug by already endless teasing and prodding and boundary-seeking.

"It's been thoroughly documented, even by modern accountants. For instance, two years ago they found a boy in Peru that had lived eight years with the mountain goats of the area. He drank their milk, ate vegetation- I mean, even his mobility was a direct reflection of theirs."

He tilted his head, raised an unruly brown brow. "I'm surprised, is all," he said before Johnny could ask.

"Like I told you, I believe in any number of things, but I like to have documentation published by credible sources."

"That a jab, Storm?"

"Do I have to remind you of Iowa? Because I'd rather forget Iowa. And don't think I haven't seen those rags you keep in your desk, either, Parker."

Their smiles almost met, came far too close to it, in fact, that they quickly shot looks over opposite shoulders as if studiously avoiding one another's eyes would get them anywhere in the world. As if they didn't already know that the only way for them to move was forward, together.

Scuffing his heel against the pale dirt of the so-called parking lot, Johnny broke their silence with a cleared throat and a Heimlich thump to the roof of the car. "Well, let's get to it then before the sun goes down."

Later, when the moon was high and the trees scoped higher, he didn't say a word when Parker wordlessly slipped a flashlight in his hand. Nor did he say anything when their shoulders brushed more often than not under the ruse of not straying too far off the beaten path.

His smile was a secret whispered to his teeth, and the sediment in his chest was some that Jen would have to work hard to excavate, but the more he thought about it the more he knew it wouldn't be too Herculean of a task.

**Author's Note:**

> if y'all have any specific cases/scenes/eps you'd like to see me hit on or just wanna chat feel free to hmu on my tumblr @foxmulldr !!


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